The fact is, knowing your audience is a huge factor in whether you will be successful or not in getting traffic to your website. It’s also the key to creating excellent products and/or services that are sought after. Understanding your audience effects everything you do in developing a successful business.

Use the following 3 steps to define, find, and interact with your ideal audience.

Describe Your Ideal Customer – To determine who your audience is, first write down exactly the type of person you’d like to work with. This is a make believe person right now, and you’ll refine this description as you move forward. For example: “My ideal customer is an upper level executive who loves playing golf and going on golfing vacations.”

Find Your Audience – You can use social media like Facebook.com, Linkedin.com, and Twitter.com to locate your audience. Find them on forums and social media and read what they are talking about. Learn what they care about. Learn about their needs, problems, issues, and questions. For example: Find discussion groups online of people talking about golf, and golfing vacations.

Engage Your Audience – Once you find them, it’s important to converse with them. Ask them questions; find out how they feel about things. You can get so much information, as well as fodder for online content and even product ideas by talking to and engaging with your audience. Caution: This is not the time to try to sell to them. Just be friendly, ask questions, offer help if you know something, and keep it casual. For example: If someone talks about a problem with their golf clubs or golf balls and you know the answer or have information that might help them, talk to them about it. Do so freely and without expecting anything in return.

As you converse and participate with your ideal audience members, you’ll be able to refine your description about your audience, perfecting it so that you can easily search for and find out where your audience members spend their time. Once you know where they are, you can learn more about them, as a group, and what their needs, wants, and desires are.

Most importantly, you’ll be able to come up with products that fit perfectly with that audience as well as developing marketing ideas that connect you with them like a laser. Describing, finding and engaging your audience, and then delivering exactly what they want and need, based on your discoveries, involves a very powerful series of methods that will lead to success.

Now, let’s assume you know who your audience is, and what your products or services are. Next, we’ll go over some free and inexpensive methods of getting traffic that will help you become more successful, not only at getting traffic, but getting the right type of traffic to your website.